You should never live freely

〜real "freedom" 99% of you don't understand〜

You might have thought, "Ha, what kind of title this is! There is no way that I'd want to live like that".

Horiemon, the famous Japanese entrepreneur, also says, "Do whatever you want to do".
Being free is always better than being unfree, right?

Well, I put this title just to make you think that way.
I'm going to say it again:
You should never live freely.

Think of Roger Federer.
(By the way, he is a professional tennis player, and he is like a "living god" in the world of tennis. Imagine him as a tennis-player version of Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson.)

He seems to be able to move across the court and hit the ball quite freely, compared with any other players on the earth.
But let's observe him very carefully.
Is he REALLY moving freely?
Well, I would say NO.
If we think carefully, we will notice how he moves un-freely.

Look at the sophisticated form of his service.
Every time he serves, he takes the exactly the same form, just like it is copied and pasted.
His movements are extremely "unfree".

Movements made by professionals are often extremely unfree, just like his service.
We then find beauty in such movements lacking freedom.

Let's now consider how a baby moves.
A baby seems to enjoy moving,
flapping his hands, kicking his legs up and down, maybe hitting toys lively.

These movements of the baby are extremely "free".
However, with his freedom, what can the baby do?
He can't even keep his feet on the ground by himself.

Are you getting what I want to tell you?

Here is another example.

Let's assume that you are travelling abroad, and decided to go somewhere far by train.
The only things you have with you are your smartphone which is out of service, and a book.

We can say you don't have any freedom,
because you can only move on the train, your smartphone is dead, and the only thing you can do is to read your book.

You might have been a person who is always checking your smartphone, but sadly, it's out of service.

For the time being, you might think of reading the book, even though you are not a kind of person who reads books.

You are now "free" to read the book, because you are in the environment there is no freedom.

Here is still another example, just to make sure.

There is a person who is blind.

We think, he should be quite unfree, because he always needs someone's help whenever he wants to do something.

However, because he can't see, his auditory, olfactory and tactile senses are probably keener than those of anybody else who can see.
For those who can't depend on their sight, the auditory and olfactory senses serve as their "eyes".

For example, they can recognize if it is Shibuya or Shinjuku, how far away they are from the station, just by smelling the scent of the city.

Well, what I want to say is, absence of freedom often opens up a path to freedom.

The real "freedom" is hidden under the skin of its absence.

People may say that absence of freedom is not freedom; but you may be able to find real "freedom" in its absence.


If you agree with it, send it to a friend or share it on SNS!

Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."


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Comments

1. Nathan gurevitch
[2020/06/24 06:32:42 JST(UTC+09:00)]

you really know how to get the minds gears rotating 🙏

2. Fully Hatter
[2020/06/25 10:09:02 JST(UTC+09:00)]

> Nathan gurevitch
Thanks for your comments!

3. colinscycling
[2021/01/13 00:55:38 JST(UTC+09:00)]

I agree, also, the fact that everything you focused on would be of a physical material circumstance of not being free. For your example of the tennis player, he has trained his movements to be exact, so in essence they are not free. Let's just consider his mind in this instance, is it not more free to focus on and to be mindful of his movements since his body is not free? Maybe not being free in physical reality gives us the freedom in mental expansion.?

4. Fully Hatter
[2021/01/14 21:00:23 JST(UTC+09:00)]

> colinscycling
Thank you for your comment.
As I commented on another Japanese page of this site (https://furimako.com/world/grown-up), I think "freedom" has two meanings.

The first is freedom in the sense of "the number of possibilities to choose".

Taking "chess" as an example, this is the number of chess moves in a given situation.
When comparing a situation where you have only one move and a situation where you have dozens of moves, the latter is the preferred situation in most cases.
Slaves, children abused by parents, and citizens of some countries are prone to unhappiness because the "the number of possibilities to choose" is extremely small.
Therefore, I think that the act of increasing the number should be valued.
For example, go to a place you've never been to, read a new book, meet a new person, and so on.

Another meaning of "freedom" is like a "best candidate list".
Taking "chess" as an example, when a professional glances at the board of chess, he comes up with a few best moves.
As you can imagine from the chess example above, the most ideal situation is "you have only one obvious best move".

Therefore, it is of course important to expand "the number of possibilities to choose", but it is also extremely important to narrow down the "best candidate list".

Taking Roger Federer as an example, he has enough "the number of possibilities to choose", so from today he can quit tennis altogether and devote himself to table tennis to become a professional table tennis player.
However, he keeps playing tennis every day because his "best candidate list" has very few "choices" (the obvious best move is known, that is, playing tennis).
Similarly, if you look at the people around you, you'll find that happy people always tend to have very few "choices" in the "best candidate list".

Comment here, and Fully Hatter will reply with affection.


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